LBnuke

After 3 months of complete immersion, the Autism Women’s Network site is live and open to the public. I am still adding features and fixing the occasional bug here and there, but for the most part, it is done.

Autism Women's Network Website

Building this site has been an amazing experience for me. I am happy to get to contribute something to the AWN, which is an awesome organization that “provides effective supports to autistic females of all ages through a sense of community, advocacy and resources”. This site is open to all supporters including men and non-autistic people.

The response has been amazing! After just 3 days, we have more than 150 registered users and over 1000 forum posts! I would like to extend a big thank you to all the beta testers and other people who have been helping to get this site up.

A large part of my obsession while working on this site has been in learning Drupal, an open source PHP/MySQL content management system and framework. I have been running a Drupal test site since 2003. About 2 times a year, I dust it off, update it, and try to love it. Usually, I end up hating it, but keep going back because of the large community that surrounds it. There could not be so much Drupal love without a reason.

I am now a Druciple. I will still use WordPress for as many sites as I can, but for larger projects, it is really nice to have the amazing power and endless flexibility of Drupal as part of my web dev arsenal. I look forward to continued work on this site and continued development with Drupal.

Writing on the iPhone. Hard to breathe. Shaky. Strangely okay besides that. Sometimes writing helps. Been very busy lately. All Drupal all the time. Besides from the insane learning curve and non-intuitive UI, I am in awe of its power and flexibility. After more than 15 hours of video tutorials and reading tons of docs, I am finally understanding how it works and how the code is organized. I am learning while building a site for an awesome organization. Will link to it when it is done. If all goes according to plan, it will launch around Jan. 1st, 2010. Not mentioning the org. because there is a board and I don’t know if things like that have to be decided about, but if someone who knows the answer and wants to post it in the comments, go for it I haven’t used Drupal to build a site since version 4.1 other than keeping my test site updated. Been wanting to learn it for real for a few years so very happy to finally get around to it. Still, it makes me appreciate the simplicity and clean code of WordPress even more than I already do. Been having some small jobs besides from that.

Me & K went to Monterey for K’s 40th birthday and had an awesome time. Happy birthday K! We went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium to see the seahorse exhibit. It was amazing. We also saw lots of sharks and rays and other random sea creatures. We stayed overnight at a nice bed and breakfast and got home the next day in time to give Halloween candy to kids. Not so many kids this year.

Still hard to breathe but not so dizzy anymore. Sometimes it is kind of annoying to be me but most of the time I like it. Enough writing for now. I think it helped some.